I just finished shooting the rest of my visual studio extensibility videos. They are being converted now and should be on YouTube later today.
Hopefully I’ll get some feedback on how to make these better. I want to keep things as simple as possible and am not too interested in spending money on this. So with in those parameters – what can I do better?
Also, what topics would be interesting? I am about to do a series on BizTalk covering things like custom pipelines and adapters, and a few Orchestration tricks. I’m also thinking about digging deeper in to the VS debugger. I started to talk about break points in this set but cut myself off.
One thing I learned as I did this is that making a video isn’t as easy as it appeared. The actual shooting part is a pain. I hate being on video which is why you don’t see me in the videos anymore. The other part is rehearsal, part of keeping it simple it shooting from the hip. Which means that the video is going to be one continuous stumble. That will turn off a lot of viewer. I honestly couldn’t care less. The info doesn’t change, it just becomes more hip in the presentation. I hate hip and usually hip is shallow. I would prefer to be right and appear foolish than look hip and be wrong.
What am I using to make the videos:
I have a Sony DCR-SR40. It shoots very nice MPEG2 video which I can download via USB2. The camera basically becomes an external hard drive when I plug it in.
The editing is being done using ULEAD VideoStudio. I’m still using the Trail version but I’m going to buy it. For $99 I think it is a pretty good package. Windows Movie Maker would have worked fine but I couldn’t get it to work with the MPEG2 coming from my camera. I would have had to buy another program anyway. VideoStudio seems to just a little better and lets me do everything in one place. I like that.
For my skill level I don’t think anything more would make sense. Adobe’s FinalCut for instance would be way overkill.
I also looked at the freeware out there. None of it looked that good and most required more money to do what I needed.
One thing I could do differently is record directly from the screen. Right now I just point the camera at my monitor and record that way. It seems to work ok (good enough, not great). I could use the Windows Media Encoder package to capture the screen to video. That would put an end to me zooming and panning the camera around. I might do that, but then I would be forced to do more editing than I currently have to do.
Feedback on how I can improve this would be greatly appreciated. Topics too.